Rustock - The King of All Other Botnets

The security firm 'M86' has formulated a list of "Top Ten Most Wanted" Spam Spewing Botnets for the first half of 2010. Majority of the botnets are believed to be controlled by the cyber criminals in the Eastern Europe to manipulate computer systems, generally the PCs across the globe.

Interestingly, the Rustock Botnet produced around 43% of all the spam. Currently, it is the king of all spam, whose productivity is growing continuously. The malware makes use of a kernel mode rootkit and injects arbitrary text in the spam from Wikipedia queries. It is also proficient to perform TLS encryption. This botnet mainly focuses on pharmaceutical spam.

Mega-D botnet stood at the second place by producing around 10.2% of the total spam. It is a long running botnet that has had its highs and lows due to the attention it gets from researchers across the globe. Similar to the Rustock botnet, it also concentrates mainly on the pharmaceutical spam.

Festi botnet secured the third place by generating around 8% of the total spam. It is relatively a new category of spambot that utilizes a kernel mode rootkit and is very often installed along Pushdo on the similar host.

According to M86, Pushdo is a comprehensive botnet, which was first noticed in the mid 2007. It is a key spammer that sends a wide variety of promotional messages for designer ripoffs, pharmaceuticals, software and more. This reflects the botnets wide range of customers. Like all other botnets, it is also very efficient in spreading malware. This botnet produced 6.3% of all the spam and hence placed at rank four by M86.

Next on the list is the Grum (6.3%) botnet. It is an irritating spam botnet because it has an affinity to infect files indicated by the autorun registries. This botnet generally focuses on pharmaceutical spam.

The Lethic botnet is at number six with an approximate spam rate of 4.5%. This botnet targets on sending replica watch and pharmaceutical campaigns. It is basically a proxy type of a spambot which transmits spam from a control server to the destination.

Bobax is at number seven on the list. It constitutes around 4.3% of the total spam. It is also a long running botnet that makes use of sophisticated techniques to trace its command servers. It mainly targets on pharmaceutical spam. This botnet gained a wide media attention in 2008 and is also known as "Kraken".

Donbot, Maazben and Bagle are also ranked in the M86's list. They produce a total of 1.3%, 2.0% and 3.5% spam respectively.

Related article: Rustock Become The World’s Largest Spam Botnet

» SPAMfighter News - 28-07-2010

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